New Play in Manhattan

Summer and Smoke (by Tennessee Williams; produced by Margo Jones) is all too plainly--but not too happily--by the author of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. What stamps, and sometimes rubber-stamps, it as his is the nature of the story and the style of the storytelling; far too often missing is the talent of the storyteller.

Here again is Southern woman sore beset, hounded by desire and hobbled by gentility, and wrecked not so much by passion as by the attempt to give it a prettier name, to deny its carnal nature. Alma Winemiller (Margaret Phillips) is a minister's repressed, highfalutin daughter, passionately in love with the hell-raising son of the doctor next door. Possibly John Buchanan (nicely played by Tod Andrews) would have fallen for Alma had not her ladylike insistences, her chatter about the spiritual side of love, been too much for him. By the time Alma looks sex squarely in the face, it is too late to win John's love or even arouse his lust: he has kind of taken her words to heart, and settled down with someone else. For Alma, there is the bench in the square and the passing traveling salesman.

Whatever its resemblances to Williams' other plays, the play he meant to write in Slimmer and Smoke is easy to approve of. The only trouble is, he has not written it. It remains only a lucid diagram. Summer and Smoke has moments of sad, sharp insight, but little coherence and intensity as a whole. The reason is partly structural. In none of his plays has Tennessee Williams made a classic frontal assault on drama. Writing episodically, with tricks of stagecraft and a crutchlike use of offstage music, he has always trusted to a vague sense of poetry and a vivid sense of theater to pull him through. Here the sense of theater is weakened by wordiness and the episodic method is inadequate. The episodes themselves are often skimpy and short-breathed; the minor characters are mostly not even wooden--just beaverboard. The many scenes, instead of serving as a flight of stairs to the great burst of emotion at the end, are like stepping-stones in a rushing stream, with awkward jumps between.

Summer and Smoke has one very genuine virtue: Margaret Phillips' performance as Alma. Condemned to talk like a book throughout, Miss Phillips reveals an unfailing ear for rhythm, an unfaltering instinct for character.

Margaret Phillips' role (which Playwright Williams originally wrote with Katharine Cornell in mind) is only her fourth on Broadway, but it marks the sort of personal triumph that has attended Williams' other heroines (Laurette Taylor in Menagerie, Jessica Tandy in Streetcar). Although her skill and her accent suggest an apprenticeship on the English stage, 15-year-old Maggie knew nothing about acting when she came to the U.S. in 1939 on a visit from her native Cwmgwrach (pronounced Coom-grawk), Wales.

At 24, Maggie is a slim, unaffected girl whose British accent is faintly touched by a Welsh burr. Her strong face, which has the same lean angularity as Jessica Tandy's, is not conventionally pretty. Stranded here by the war with her mother (they still share a two-room walkup apartment in Manhattan), she took her Welsh accent to a Bronx high school. There, trying out for an all-girl student production of Shaw's Pygmalion, she was cast inevitably as Professor Higgins. What drew her into the professional theater was a meeting with a Welsh-speaking actor in Broadway's The Corn Is Green.

In 1942, after two summers of stock, she reached Broadway in a flop. Two years later she played an ingenue in The Late George Apley. Her 1947 performance as Birdie in Another Part of the Forest marked her plainly as one of the theater's most promising young actresses. It won her the part in Slimmer and Smoke.

Maggie's career has been complicated by an Actors' Equity ruling that makes aliens sit idle for six months between acting engagements; but she will be a U.S. citizen next year. Between stage jobs, she has worked as a department store salesgirl, a filing clerk, an office girl, on television and on the radio. Last week her time had grown more valuable; Hollywood was bidding for it.

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